I never could decipher why a football team in America came to christen themselves the ‘San Francisco 49ers’.
But why we Bharatis could now be called the 47ers, I have come to understand.
The reason is the two dates that, we are to understand, encapsulate the intended destiny of this great nation – 2047 and 1947.
Thus we are the 47ers.
2047
The above year is when India is stated to become a viksit (developed) nation after all. And there is great clarity already about what it will mean to be ‘developed’.
First, economically, all the wasteful custody of the nation’s wealth for socialist decades in the hands of public institutions will breathe its last.
Moneys and resources will come to be wholly and wholesomely transferred into the safe-keeping of conscientious private parties, whose self-regarding interests will ensure that not a rupee is spent on such non-profitable shenanigans as public education, public health, public employment, and all other similar disreputable areas which allow “we the people” to suck the coffers of the realm to the detriment of those exceptional sons (not many daughters there) of Bharat who sleep not a wink in pursuit of our greatness and glory.
Thus 2047 may be trusted to see not just an Adani but many Adanis poised to better the Elon Musks and the Donald Trumps by several hundred billions.
It will see a “defence industry” that leaves the Pentagon far behind, and ready to strike terror into the many enemies who would by then have also been suitably generated to enhance national supremacy, for what nation can be great unless it has enemies whom it may threaten with aplomb, especially in times when “we the people” sink to their familiar lows and seek to arraign the powers-that-be for neglecting the people’s interests.
Malls, marts, high rises will dot the metropolitan landscape and skyline, and looking at monuments taller than the Eiffel Tower and the Burj Khalifa, the patriotic poor will gawk at national glory and know that nations do not live by bread alone, and that pride is more fulfilling than two square meals.
These earth-shaking strides towards developed status of Bharat will of course require corresponding political/systemic transformations, to facilitate such development at rapid pace by warding off excessive and debilitating adherence to democracy.
Thus, Bharat will also come to have an all-powerful president instead of a mere prime minister whom a no-good parliament seeks constantly to hold to account.
And, thanks to that divine dispensation whose secret has been shared by Narendra Modi with “we the people”, we may well hope that Modi will be that all-powerful president in 2047 after all.
Parliamentarians will no doubt continue to meet in the fine new building, and do as the divinely ordained president wishes them to do.
And the patriotic media will learn that fault must be found with erring legislators against the perfection of the president.
1947
But none of this development may come to be of any lasting consequence unless the other engine also continues to fire with no-nonsense zeal, disregarding the pusillanimous squeaks of the misbegotten secularists.
Not many realise still the true meaning and genius of the ‘double-engine’ metaphor, thinking that this has to do with just having BJP governments in the states to align with the Modi-led one at the centre.
Think again.
The whole idea from the beginning has been to drive one engine forward to 2047, yielding mind-boggling technological modernity, and the second engine backward to 1947 to yield a cultural nationhood in collaborative and uncritical sync with such modernity.
Put simply, this other engine, now in full flow here, there, and elsewhere, has the task of completing the unfinished business of Partition, namely to reconstitute Bharat into a Hindu Pakistan.
The exertion of this backward engine carries with it an ingenious economic fallout as well.
Imagine how many thousands upon thousands of jobless young Indians may be employed in digging up thousands upon thousands of usurping mosques, generating a scheme of incredible originality by combining the cultural agenda with daily wages – a sort of spiritual reformulation of the secularly meagre MGNREGA.
To the best of our scholarship, no modern nation has ever conceived of so clever a schema whereby two engines, one going forward and the other backward, are primed to yield not a contrary fruit but one consistent with both revanchism and modernity.
Surely, not since the uplifting experiments of the 1930s in Germany has such a project been undertaken with such success.
And thus it is that we are justly christened the 47ers, set to give the 49ers and their pretensions a run for their dollars.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
